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      <div class="titlepage">
        <div>
          <div>
            <h2 class="title"><a id="id484000"></a>The Interface Culture</h2>
          </div>
          <div>
            <h3 class="subtitle">
              <i>with annotations</i>
            </h3>
          </div>
          <div>
            <div class="author">
              <h3 class="author"><span class="firstname">Neal</span> <span class="surname">Stephenson</span></h3>
            </div>
          </div>
          <div>
            <div class="abstract">
              <p class="title">
                <b>Abstract</b>
              </p>
              <p>[I've long appreciated Neal Stephenson's brilliant essay on culture. It is part of a longer essay entitled <em class="citetitle">In The Beginning Was The Command Line</em>. That essay is aimed principally at computerists whereas I believe <em class="citetitle">The Interface Culture</em> section should have a much wider audience. But pointing people to the larger essay and then telling them to do a text search for a particular section is tedious. Some years ago for my own edification I outlined it. Recently I decided it would be a good document with which to try out DocBook. <a class="xref" href="#definitivedocbook" title="DocBook: The Definitive Guide">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook Definitive</abbr>]</a> <a class="xref" href="#docbookxsl" title="DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook XSL</abbr>]</a>]</p>
              <p>The complete essay is widely available on the web <a class="xref" href="#commandlinepage1" title="In the Beginning was the Command Line">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL I</abbr>]</a> <a class="xref" href="#commandlinepage2" title="In the Beginning was the Command Line">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL II</abbr>]</a> as well as a short book <a class="xref" href="#commandlinebook" title="In the Beginning was the Command Line">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL book</abbr>]</a>.</p>
              <p>So herewith is Neal Stephenson's The Interface Culture standing alone, with my added headings.]</p>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <hr />
      </div>
      <div class="toc">
        <p>
          <b>Table of Contents</b>
        </p>
        <dl>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id539126">The Interface Culture</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id539141">[Dazzled by manufactured images]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dd>
            <dl>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id538136">[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id487109">[Writers &amp; Disney]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id487153">[Word not fungible]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486010">[Word vs Disney]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486103">[Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
            </dl>
          </dd>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486132">[Why do we reject word-based interfaces?]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486164">[Intellectualism failed]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dd>
            <dl>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486533">[Global monoculture]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486583">[Specific culture: tools for understanding the world]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486604">[People who run things pay lip service, but don't raise their children that way]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486649">[Responsibility to country]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
              <dt>
                <span class="section">
                  <a href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a>
                </span>
              </dt>
            </dl>
          </dd>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="section">
              <a href="#id486909">[Colophon]</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="bibliography">
              <a href="#id486959">Bibliography</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
          <dt>
            <span class="index">
              <a href="#id528053">Index</a>
            </span>
          </dt>
        </dl>
      </div>
      <a id="id539114" class="indexterm"></a>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id539126"></a>The Interface Culture</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
THE INTERFACE CULTURE
Neal Stephenson

[Summary titles in square brackets by Michael Shook]</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id539141"></a>[Dazzled by manufactured images]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was presented with the following tableau vivant: near the entrance a young couple were standing in front of a large cosmetics display. The man was stolidly holding a shopping basket between his hands while his mate raked blister-packs of makeup off the display and piled them in. Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics.</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id539152"></a>[Disney mediated experience]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
I was in Disney World<a id="id539161" class="indexterm"></a>
recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom<a id="id538089" class="indexterm"></a>, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder<a id="id538099" class="indexterm"></a>. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.</p>
        <p>
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.</p>
        <p>
Americans' preference for mediated experiences<a id="id538116" class="indexterm"></a> is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs<a id="id538124" class="indexterm"></a> and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.</p>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id538136"></a>[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
In the part of Disney World called the Animal Kingdom there is a new attraction, slated to open in March 1999, called the Maharajah Jungle Trek. It was open for sneak previews when I was there. This is a complete stone-by-stone reproduction of a hypothetical ruin in the jungles of India<a id="id487019" class="indexterm"></a>. According to its backstory, it was built by a local rajah in the 16th Century as a game reserve. He would go there with his princely guests to hunt Bengal tigers. As time went on it fell into disrepair and the tigers and monkeys took it over; eventually, around the time of India's independence, it became a government wildlife reserve, now open to visitors.</p>
          <p>
The place looks more like what I have just described than any actual building you might find in India. All the stones in the broken walls are weathered as if monsoon rains had been trickling down them for centuries, the paint on the gorgeous murals is flaked and faded just so, and Bengal tigers loll amid stumps of broken columns. Where modern repairs have been made to the ancient structure, they've been done, not as Disney's engineers would do them, but as thrifty Indian janitors would--with hunks of bamboo and rust-spotted hunks of rebar. The rust is painted on, or course, and protected from real rust by a plastic clear-coat, but you can't tell unless you get down on your knees.</p>
          <p>
In one place you walk along a stone wall with a series of old pitted friezes carved into it. One end of the wall has broken off and settled into the earth, perhaps because of some long-forgotten earthquake, and so a broad jagged crack runs across a panel or two, but the story is still readable: first, primordial chaos leads to a flourishing of many animal species. Next, we see the Tree of Life<a id="id487051" class="indexterm"></a> surrounded by diverse animals. This is an obvious allusion (or, in showbiz lingo, a tie-in) to the gigantic Tree of Life that dominates the center of Disney's Animal Kingdom just as the Castle dominates the Magic Kingdom or the Sphere does Epcot. But it's rendered in historically correct style and could probably fool anyone who didn't have a Ph.D. in Indian art history.</p>
          <p>
The next panel shows a mustachioed H. sapiens chopping down the Tree of Life with a scimitar, and the animals fleeing every which way. The one after that shows the misguided human getting walloped by a tidal wave, part of a latter-day Deluge presumably brought on by his stupidity.</p>
          <p>
The final panel, then, portrays the Sapling of Life beginning to grow back, but now Man has ditched the edged weapon and joined the other animals in standing around to adore and praise it.</p>
          <p>
It is, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck<a id="id487076" class="indexterm"></a>: the scenario, commonly espoused among modern-day environmentalists<a id="id487084" class="indexterm"></a>, that the world faces an upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few decades or centuries and end when we find a new harmonious modus vivendi with Nature.</p>
          <p>
Taken as a whole the frieze is a pretty brilliant piece of work. Obviously it's not an ancient Indian ruin, and some person or people now living deserve credit for it. But there are no signatures on the Maharajah's game reserve at Disney World. There are no signatures on anything, because it would ruin the whole effect to have long strings of production credits dangling from every custom-worn brick, as they do from Hollywood movies.</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id487109"></a>[Writers &amp; Disney]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
Among Hollywood writers<a id="id487118" class="indexterm"></a>, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion--a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at; and just as the command-line interface<a id="id487133" class="indexterm"></a> opens a much more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI<a id="id487142" class="indexterm"></a>, so it is with words, writer, and reader.</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id487153"></a>[Word not fungible]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
The word<a id="id487162" class="indexterm"></a>, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media<a id="id487170" class="indexterm"></a><sup>[<a id="id487176" href="#ftn.id487176" class="footnote">1</a>]</sup> (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts<a id="id485992" class="indexterm"></a> printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted<a id="id486000" class="indexterm"></a> and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486010"></a>[Word vs Disney]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
But this special quality of words and of written communication would have the same effect on Disney's product as spray-painted graffiti on a magic mirror. So Disney does most of its communication without resorting to words, and for the most part, the words aren't missed. Some of Disney's older properties, such as Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and Alice in Wonderland, came out of books<a id="id486019" class="indexterm"></a>. But the authors' names are rarely if ever mentioned, and you can't buy the original books at the Disney store. If you could, they would all seem old and queer, like very bad knockoffs of the purer, more authentic Disney versions. Compared to more recent productions like Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, the Disney movies based on these books (particularly Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan) seem deeply bizarre, and not wholly appropriate for children. That stands to reason, because Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like x-rays through a wall. Probably for this very reason, Disney seems to have stopped buying books altogether, and now finds its themes and characters in folk tales, which have the lapidary, time-worn quality of the ancient bricks in the Maharajah's ruins.</p>
          <p>
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.</p>
          <p>
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that's for sale in Disney World's African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.</p>
          <p>
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals<a id="id486073" class="indexterm"></a> of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.</p>
          <p>
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it's easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can't argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.</p>
          <p>
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486103"></a>[Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
Disney and Apple<a id="id486113" class="indexterm"></a>/Microsoft<a id="id486120" class="indexterm"></a> are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486132"></a>[Why do we reject word-based interfaces?]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?</p>
        <p>
Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.
</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486164"></a>[Intellectualism failed]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism<a id="id486174" class="indexterm"></a> failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.</p>
        <p>
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.</p>
        <p>
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran<a id="id486218" class="indexterm"></a>, and the Bill of Rights<a id="id486226" class="indexterm"></a>. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486243"></a>[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
Orlando<a id="id486252" class="indexterm"></a> used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.</p>
        <p>
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam<a id="id486272" class="indexterm"></a>, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism<a id="id486282" class="indexterm"></a> and diversity<a id="id486291" class="indexterm"></a>, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.</p>
        <p>
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television<a id="id486326" class="indexterm"></a>; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486348"></a>[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture<a id="id486358" class="indexterm"></a> left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor<a id="id486366" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id486372" class="indexterm"></a>, and begin pumping bullets<a id="id486380" class="indexterm"></a> into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing <a id="chicago.bulls"></a>Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.</p>
        <p>
The global anti-culture<a id="id486503" class="indexterm"></a> that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam<a id="id486510" class="indexterm"></a> and France<a id="id486518" class="indexterm"></a>, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!
</p>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486533"></a>[Global monoculture]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture<a id="id486542" class="indexterm"></a>, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism<a id="id486549" class="indexterm"></a>, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists<a id="id486559" class="indexterm"></a> vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless<a id="id486569" class="indexterm"></a> human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486583"></a>[Specific culture: tools for understanding the world]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.
</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486604"></a>[People who run things pay lip service, but don't raise their children that way]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism<a id="id486614" class="indexterm"></a> and diversity<a id="id486622" class="indexterm"></a> and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.
</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486649"></a>[Responsibility to country]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu<a id="id486666" class="indexterm"></a> ruins in Orlando.</p>
          <p>
You may be asking: what the hell does all this have to do with operating systems? As I've explained, there is no way to explain the domination of the OS market by Apple/Microsoft without looking to cultural explanations, and so I can't get anywhere, in this essay, without first letting you know where I'm coming from vis-a-vis contemporary culture.
</p>
        </div>
        <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
          <div class="titlepage">
            <div>
              <div>
                <h3 class="title"><a id="id486692"></a>[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</h3>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
          <p>
Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi<a id="id486701" class="indexterm"></a> in H.G. Wells's<a id="id486710" class="indexterm"></a> <em class="citetitle">The Time Machine</em>, except that it's been turned upside down. In <em class="citetitle">The Time Machine</em> the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media<a id="id486733" class="indexterm"></a> directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture<a id="id486741" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id486747" class="indexterm"></a> that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.</p>
          <p>
Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces<a id="id486764" class="indexterm"></a> so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India<a id="id486774" class="indexterm"></a> and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that's no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.</p>
          <p>
Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to the point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a tantrum about those unlettered philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments<a id="id486790" class="indexterm"></a> carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface<a id="id486799" class="indexterm"></a>--and blowing his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images. Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of conspiracy theory.</p>
          <p>
But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I describe, here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily bad now:</p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486819"></a>[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>
It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on "real" ones in Kenya<a id="id486829" class="indexterm"></a>. The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism<a id="id486843" class="indexterm"></a>, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease<a id="id486851" class="indexterm"></a>, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise. The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface<a id="id486869" class="indexterm"></a>, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live. Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but, hey, if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster<a id="id486884" class="indexterm"></a> in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese<a id="id486893" class="indexterm"></a>, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly adorable cartoon characters. My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.</p>
      </div>
      <div class="section" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="id486909"></a>[Colophon]</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <p>This document is structured with DocBook <a class="xref" href="#definitivedocbook" title="DocBook: The Definitive Guide">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook Definitive</abbr>]</a> and formated with DocBook XSL <a class="xref" href="#docbookxsl" title="DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook XSL</abbr>]</a>. It is available as DocBook XML source <a class="xref" href="#ticwaxml" title="The Interface Culture with annotations (DocBook XML source)">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa XML</abbr>]</a>, PDF <a class="xref" href="#ticwapdf" title="The Interface Culture with annotations (PDF)">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa PDF</abbr>]</a> and HTML <a class="xref" href="#ticwahtml" title="The Interface Culture with annotations (html)">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa HTML</abbr>]</a>.</p>
      </div>
      <div class="bibliography">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title"><a id="id486959"></a>Bibliography</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="definitivedocbook"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook Definitive</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">DocBook: The Definitive Guide</em></span></span>, Walsh, Norman and Stayton, Bob. <span class="pubdate">2006</span> Available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html" target="_top">http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html</a>
            </span>.
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="docbookxsl"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">DocBook XSL</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide</em></span></span>, Stayton, Bob. <span class="pubdate">2007</span> Available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/" target="_top">http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/</a>
            </span>.
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="commandlinepage1"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL I</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">In the Beginning was the Command Line</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal. <span class="pubdate">1999</span> Available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html" target="_top">http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html</a>
            </span>.
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="commandlinepage2"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL II</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">In the Beginning was the Command Line</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal. <span class="pubdate">1999</span> Available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml" target="_top">http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml</a>
            </span>.
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="commandlinebook"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">ItBwtCL book</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">In the Beginning was the Command Line</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal., <span class="publishername">Harper Perennial</span>, <span class="pubdate">1999</span>.
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="ticwaxml"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa XML</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">The Interface Culture with annotations (DocBook XML source)</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal., <span class="publishername">Self-published</span>, <span class="pubdate">2009</span> available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.xml" target="_top">http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.xml</a>
            </span> and <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=accnfh3pfb3_312cmngnxsx" target="_top">http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=accnfh3pfb3_312cmngnxsx</a>
            </span>
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="ticwapdf"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa PDF</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">The Interface Culture with annotations (PDF)</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal., <span class="publishername">Self-published</span>, <span class="pubdate">2009</span> available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.pdf" target="_top">http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.pdf</a>.
            </span>
        </p>
        </div>
        <div class="bibliomixed">
          <a id="ticwahtml"></a>
          <p class="bibliomixed">[<abbr class="abbrev">tICwa HTML</abbr>] 
            
            <span class="title"><span class="citetitle"><em class="citetitle">The Interface Culture with annotations (html)</em></span></span>, Stephenson, Neal., <span class="publishername">Self-published</span>, <span class="pubdate">2009</span> available at <span class="bibliomisc">
                <a class="ulink" href="http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.html" target="_top">http://mshook.googlepages.com/theInterfaceCultureWithAnnotations.html</a>.
            </span>
        </p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="index">
        <div class="titlepage">
          <div>
            <div>
              <h2 class="title"><a id="id528053"></a>Index</h2>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        <div class="index">
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>A</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>alchoholism, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
              <dt>anti-culture, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
              <dt>Apple, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486103">[Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>B</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Bill of Rights, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486164">[Intellectualism failed]</a></dt>
              <dt>books, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486010">[Word vs Disney]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>C</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>camcorder, <a class="indexterm" href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a></dt>
              <dt>cathedral, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486010">[Word vs Disney]</a></dt>
              <dt>Chicago Bulls, <a class="indexterm" href="#chicago.bulls">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
              <dt>command-line interface, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487109">[Writers &amp; Disney]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
              <dt>copyright, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487153">[Word not fungible]</a></dt>
              <dt>culture, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>D</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>disease, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
              <dt>Disney</dt>
              <dd>
                <dl>
                  <dt>Disney World, <a class="indexterm" href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a></dt>
                  <dt>Magic Kingdom, <a class="indexterm" href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a></dt>
                </dl>
              </dd>
              <dt>diversity, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486604">[People who run things pay lip service, but don't raise their children that way]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>E</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Egypt, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
              <dt>electronic media, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487153">[Word not fungible]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>envinronmentalists, <a class="indexterm" href="#id538136">[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>F</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>feckless, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486533">[Global monoculture]</a></dt>
              <dt>France, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>G</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>GUI, <a class="indexterm" href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487109">[Writers &amp; Disney]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>H</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Hindu, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486649">[Responsibility to country]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>I</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>India, <a class="indexterm" href="#id538136">[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>intellectualism, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486164">[Intellectualism failed]</a></dt>
              <dt>Islam, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>J</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Japan, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>K</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Kenya, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
              <dt>Koran, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486164">[Intellectualism failed]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>L</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>lobster, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486819">[Too busy to comprehend everything in detail]</a></dt>
              <dt>Luxor, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>M</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>mediated experience, <a class="indexterm" href="#id539152">[Disney mediated experience]</a></dt>
              <dt>Microsoft, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486103">[Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business]</a></dt>
              <dt>monoculture, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486533">[Global monoculture]</a></dt>
              <dt>moral relativism, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486533">[Global monoculture]</a></dt>
              <dt>Morlocks and Eloi, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>multiculturalism, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a>, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486604">[People who run things pay lip service, but don't raise their children that way]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>O</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Orlando, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>P</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>popular culture, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>postmodernists, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486533">[Global monoculture]</a></dt>
              <dt>prophecy of the Bottleneck, <a class="indexterm" href="#id538136">[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>S</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Sensorial Interfaces, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>T</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>t-shirts, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487153">[Word not fungible]</a></dt>
              <dt>television, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486243">[Orlando - McCoy Air Force Base]</a></dt>
              <dt>Ten Commandments, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>terrorism, <a class="indexterm" href="#id486348">[No right &amp; wrong? No real culture]</a></dt>
              <dt>Tree of Life, <a class="indexterm" href="#id538136">[Maharajah Jungle Trek]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
          <div class="indexdiv">
            <h3>W</h3>
            <dl>
              <dt>Wells, H.G., <a class="indexterm" href="#id486692">[Two tiers: Morlocks and Eloi]</a></dt>
              <dt>word, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487153">[Word not fungible]</a></dt>
              <dt>writers, <a class="indexterm" href="#id487109">[Writers &amp; Disney]</a></dt>
            </dl>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="footnotes">
        <br />
        <hr width="100" align="left" />
        <div class="footnote">
          <p><sup>[<a id="ftn.id487176" href="#id487176" class="para">1</a>] </sup>Orolo and Artisan Quin discuss this topic in Part 2 Apert of <em class="citetitle">Anathem</em>.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
